Painting Lightening McQueen Shoes

Here's a fun fact- In the past couple of months, I've watched the movie Cars probably twenty or so times.  By now, I know all the characters' names and I could probably recite 50 to 75 % of the movies' lines from memory.

Why this sudden and intense interest in cartoon vehicles?  Well, it's Chuck.  We're a Cars household because he just loves the movie.  If you ever visit our home, you'll probably find him either (1) racing around on his bike, pretending to be Lightening McQueen, or (2) playing with his toy cars.

This Halloween, Chuck's going to dress up as Lightening McQueen.  I thought it would be fun to try painting him some shoes to go along with his costume.  It was my first time painting shoes. Here's how they came out: 

At first I wanted to get white or red canvas shoes, but they only had black ones at Walmart. Overall I'm pretty pleased with how they turned out.  They're super cute.  But, I'm not sure how long (or how well) the paint will last.... so the jury's still up about that.   I'll probably update this post in a couple of weeks to include some notes about wear and tear.... but for now here are some photos of my process in case you wanted to see what I did.

Materials:

• Canvas shoes
• Chalk
• Acrylic paint
• Thin paint brushes
• Pencils
• Paper
• Q-tip
• Paper towels
• Jar with water
• Tray to hold paint

1.  First I placed a piece of paper on top of my shoe and traced the top of the shoe to see how big to draw my images.  Then, I drew and cut out my Lightening Mcqueen.

2.  I briefly lamented not having white canvas shoes because I wasn't sure how to transfer my image to the shoes. (Seasoned crafters out there- do you know of a good way to do this?)  I ended up just tracing my image onto my shoe with sidewalk chalk (way too big, I know... but this was the smallest chalk I had) and sketching out the details.  (There's gotta be a better way, right?)

3.  I pulled out my paint and started painting my images.  After I filled in all the colors (see right shoe), I outlined my images using a pencil dipped into my black paint.  The black outline made my images much sharper and nicer to look at (see left shoe.)  Then, I just cleaned off my chalk marks with a wet q-tip.

And that's all!  Ka-chow!

Chuck's really enjoyed wearing these bad boys around town and I'm just glad that I got to craft something useful and cute.   

How are you getting ready for Halloween?  Happy crafting!